By Sara Ford
In his 1965 essay, “The White Man’s Guilt,” James Baldwin pleaded, “White man, hear me. History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
One of America’s great thinkers and writers, Baldwin loved his country deeply, even as he relentlessly criticized it with needle-sharp poignancy and vision. A central tenet of his criticism was America’s unwillingness to confront the hard truth of its history — the country’s imperfect founding, based on the economics of enslavement and the treatment of human beings like cogs in a machine, which, when broken, are simply thrown out and replaced.
America justified enslaving others by changing the neutral word “race” into a word laden with a false truth that White is superior, thereby creating racism, which, in turn, was passed down from generation to generation and used consistently to keep Black people in “their place.”
Yet, as Baldwin says, we are largely unconscious of this history, which allows us to justify defensiveness and denial when we are asked to confront it.
One reason for this lack of awareness is that we are not taught our true history. We may devote a whole high school year to American history, but we teach a history of partial facts. We teach about enslavement but do not delve into the unconscionable details; we don’t sit with it, talk about it, imagine into it and so truly grapple with it and how the effects of it are passed down to both White and Black.
We teach about Black heroes, like Harriet Tubman, but not about all the unknown Black people who exemplified heroism every day, not just in merely surviving but in constantly hoping and striving. We may or may not even learn about slave patrols, but they were the origin of our police system and founded on racism.
We highlight Abraham Lincoln’s bravery and rightness in freeing slaves but do not delve into the complexity of this action. In a debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said, “I will say that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the White and Black races.” For Lincoln, freeing slaves was a military and economic act as much as, if not more than, a moral one. We learn about Jim Crow but don’t imagine its consequences on individuals at the mercy of it or the constant stress and denigration that becomes a part of their living history, passed down to generations.
And so we mark Black History Month, a month set aside to study Black history. The irony of assigning a particular month is that it suggests Black history is something apart, when, in fact, it is a central, vital part of American history. Designating a month to it suggests partial recognition that not enough time is included for it in the regular curriculum and, at the same time, that it is separate, not equal. For if it were, it would be laced into every moment of the American history we learn.
Nevertheless, it is a month we can take as both a gift and a responsibility. It offers us a chance for immersion, a deep dive into Black history, an exploration of all that is Black — the music, the art, the literature, the food, the talk, the voices, the struggle, the victories and, significantly, the role Whiteness played. It is a month when we can choose to walk in another person’s shoes, read and listen to Black voices speaking about themselves and the world they experience, as well as speaking about Whiteness and its impact on their lives. It is a month to listen with openness and heart; a month without “but … I’m not, I didn’t.” It is a month to reckon with the reverberation of history in every one of us. And it is just the beginning.
As Amanda Gorman said in her extraordinary inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb”: “It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit / It’s the past we step into / And how we repair it.” And from this learning, stepping into, confronting, taking responsibility and repairing, we can emerge more whole and more unified. “For,” as she writes, “there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it / If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Sara Ford writes for the Southern Delaware Alliance for Racial Justice and lives in Lewes.
